To Tweet or not to Tweet?

I know a lot of you are on social media, but this will be about Twitter in general. Recently there has been a few incidents in the news where people get in trouble and lose their jobs due to tweets. You have the recent Pycon incident and then most recently an employee got fired for his actions on twitter. Let's take a look at each of these incidents and look over the details, then go over some tips to save yourself future embarrassment.

Story one took place at Pycon, which is now stupidly being called "DongleGate". Whoever comes up with these names needs a take a close look at an ice pick. Adria Richards works for SendGrid, an email delivery company. While at Pycon a couple of guys who making some jokes about forking and who's dongle was bigger than who's. Adria then felt it was her duty to tweet a picture of these guys. This in turn led to these guys getting fired. Of course there was a backlash against Adria at this point because these guys did nothing to her directly, other than be sitting in earshot of her. Once these guys got fired and people were asking for her head, Richards went on Twitter to boast that SendGrid had her back. She was fired shortly thereafter.

Story number two. Adam Orth works for Microsoft and tweeted about how the new XBox will have always on DRM. People starting asking questions and citing examples as to why this is a bad idea. Orth began to make fun of those who didn't live in a big city, and laughed at the misfortune of those without broadband internet. Just showed a general lack of care to his customers. He was fired.

Now let's take a look at some of the details here that make these two cases stand out. Let's start with Richards, she was a SendGrid Evangelist. She is the face of SendGrid and therefore is expected to be an example. Instead of doing the right thing and minding her own business asking the gentlemen to speak softer as she was trying to listen to the lightning talks at hand. She instead tried to flex her power as an Evangelist and get these guys in trouble. She knew that not only did she have a lot followers, but a lot that listen to what she says. She abused this power and it blew back on her. Orth was just an employee in the sales department, Orth thought he was safe. The problem is that when you are associated with a company like Microsoft, you are going to be noticed. Especially if you topic of conversation is the latest gaming system to come out. His story probably only got really noticed due to sites like Reddit, and that made it go viral.

So how can you avoid a situation like this yourself? There are actually a few simple steps.

Step one, understand your power on the internet. You may think that nobody is watching you, but trust me, somebody is. All it takes is one person to see your tweet, and then they will tell a friend and so on and so forth.

Step two, make sure you know your company's social media policy. You need to ask whoever is in charge of your relations if there is such a policy. Are your tweets your own? Will you been seen as a face for your company? Richards was very much the face for her company, Orth, not so much. Ignorance of the law has never worked, and it won't work in your company either if there are people pitchforks wanting you dead.

This leads us to Step three, don't assume that your company has your back. You might think that in your position that you are safe. But if you say something that is damaging the companies image, your value will be evaluated. A good way to look at your value is as follows. Take your salary and divide it by 12. An example would be say you make $60,000 a year. Do you bring $5000 of value into the company? Now how much value do you bring if PR is now being involved to clean up your mess? Trust me, if it doesn't break even, firing you looks a lot better than any kind of spin you think of.

To take away from this, if you have a twitter and it is personal, keep it that way. The moment you mention your job(name of your company, not just what you did), it is now a professional twitter, whether you like it or not. So be careful out there folks, and don't lose your job because you thought you were being funny on twitter.